Google racked up profits of $33,3 billion in the year ending July 1st. Fully 97% of this comes from AdWords sales. The infographic below (source: Wordstream.com) shows who buys all those words, and for how much:

What is going on here? Does Google exploit a quasi-monopoly and are financial firms its biggest victims, or does the lack of new value innovations force financial companies to oversize their marketing expenditures?

In the old days, if you wanted to develop a product vision and bring a proposition to market, you’d have to go through a lot of trouble and spend a lot of money to create a prototype, look for customers ready to sacrifice some of their time to give you feedback, etc. Typically, for a product to get to testing stage required burning up at least € 100.000 in development costs. No more. Now you can test your concept for free. read on

Now there’s a gutsy firm, led by a gutsy CEO, mr. Leo Apotheker (in Dutch this name can be read as: Lion’s Pharmacist). HP is the no.1 PC maker in the world. Many celebrities have declared on HP’s account that the computer ‘is personal again’. So personal, apparently, that HP itself no longer wants anything to do with it: the PC business has been effectively put up for sale.

In a further twist, HP simultaneously announced it would take over a UK software firm (ironically?) called Autonomy.

Analysts as well as investors are shocked, causing HP shares to dive to a 6-year low on August 19th.

Why? Why leave a market where you are number 1? Well, on some counts, HP is one of the last giants jumping off a sinking ship: the PC as an autonomous force in hardware

Trite, but true: the web changes everything, including the nature of the relationships between companies and their customers. To me, these three marketing concepts look unlikely to survive these changes:

When you compare my earlier blog with this one, it is obvious how much has changed. Every day, it gets easier to produce content, to share it and to react to content others produce. The beauty, or horror, of it is that industry after industry faces disruptive attacks to its dominant business models.

Established businesses are struggling with the consequences. The music industry in particular is turned upside down. Severe pressure on their core business has forced companies to launch a flurry of new initiatives. Despite this, most are bust or sold. Will this happen to your company too? - read on